More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Rod Dreher
Read between
August 5, 2019 - January 1, 2020
The contemporary Reformed theologian Hans Boersma identifies the loss of sacramentality as the key reason why the modern church is falling apart. If there is no real participation in the eternal—that is, if we do not regard matter, and even time itself, as rooted firmly in God’s being—then the life of the church can scarcely withstand the torrents of liquid modernity.
Evangelical ecclesiology is inadequate to the task of meeting postmodernity’s challenges, he has written.
If you want to build faith capable of maintaining stability and continuity, you need to regularly attend a church that celebrates a fixed liturgy. That’s how individuals come to be “shaped by the Christian story.”
What many Protestants reject as “vain repetition” in liturgical forms of worship is actually the quality of liturgy that makes it so effective at discipleship.
Eastern Orthodox priests ordinarily prescribe light fasts to spiritual beginners. The point is not to abstain from certain foods for legalistic reasons but to break the power our bodily desires have over us. “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me,” the Apostle Paul wrote to the Galatians (2:20).
As Brother Ignatius of Norcia reminds us, everything is evangelical.
Wurmbrand wrote that there are two kinds of Christians: “those who sincerely believe in God and those who, just as sincerely, believe that they believe. You can tell them apart by their actions in decisive moments.”
When both the family and the community become fragmented and fail, the transmission of religion to the next generation becomes far more difficult.
Eberstadt is one of a long line of religious thinkers to recognize that when concrete embodiments of the relationship to God crumble, it becomes very hard to hold on to Him in the abstract.
“That sense of urgency, making family come first in your life, strikes me as one starting point and foundational requirement for faithful Christians,” Gottlieb says. “There has to be a very deliberate commitment to the growth of one’s family and the development of healthy and faithful service to one’s family.”
A monastery is a place of hierarchical order, but all members are valued and united in a bond of love.
Too much exposure to morally compromising material will, over time, dull one’s moral instincts.
“My son has a peanut allergy, and from his very earliest days, we’ve had to teach him to stay away from certain foods,” says Denny Burk, a Southern Baptist pastor and seminary professor in Kentucky. “He’s only five, but he gets it and doesn’t complain about it. He has a great attitude. “But from the earliest days, we have been talking to him about it. At the church potluck every week, he doesn’t touch the table without checking with us first,” Burk continues. “We Christians have to cultivate our children about morals in the same way. They have to know that it’s fine to be a nonconformist. If
...more
“Cultures can be changed, or formed from scratch, in a single generation.”
Geography is one secret to the strength and resilience of Orthodox Jewish communities. Because their faith requires them to walk to synagogue on the Sabbath, they must live within walking distance. This is also convenient for their communal prayer life.
“You often see that Jews who are able to go to synagogue two or three times a day, in addition to the Sabbath, are also those most able to maintain a healthy distance from the most nefarious elements of modern culture. It’s a matter not just of theological commitment but of practices and of seeing yourself as part of a larger Jewish community in relationship with God.
the church can’t just be the place you go on Sundays—it must become the center of your life.
the gift of community is that it builds a social structure in which it is easier for Christians to hear and respond to God’s voice and in which others hold them accountable if they lose the straight path.
I want to provide tools and resources for all Christian families to make their homes into little monasteries.”
“Retaining the imagination necessary to see or to search for God is going to be an indispensable element in the preservation of true freedom and Christian freedom when our freedom under law becomes more and more limited,” Hanby says.
“Jews committed to traditional life put schooling above almost anything. There are families that will do just about anything short of bankrupting themselves to give their children an Orthodox Jewish education.”
ever will be in God. Every educational model presupposes an anthropology: an idea of what a human being is. In general, the mainstream model is geared toward equipping students to succeed in the workforce, to provide a pleasant, secure life for themselves and their future families, and ideally, to fulfill their personal goals—whatever those goals might be.
In traditional Christianity, the ultimate goal of the soul is to love and serve God with all one’s heart, soul, and mind, to achieve unity with Him in eternity. To prepare for eternal life, we must join ourselves to Christ and strive to live in harmony with the divine will. To be fully human is to be fully conformed to that reality—as C. S. Lewis would say, to the things that are—through cooperating with God’s freely given grace.
Since the High Middle Ages, the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake has been slowly separated from the pursuit of virtue. Today the break is clean.
“This was a culture with a definite and distinctive goal: to pass on the wisdom of the past and to produce another generation with the same ideals and values—ideals and values based on its vision of what a human being was.
The separation of learning from virtue creates a society that esteems people for their success in manipulating science, law, money, images, words, and so forth. Whether or not their accomplishments are morally worthy is a secondary question, one that will seem naïve to many if it occurs to them at all.
Dante’s Divine Comedy, the medieval masterpiece and one of the pinnacles of Western civilization, shows imaginatively how God used people from the West’s pagan past to prepare souls for the coming of Christ.
Today in the contemporary West, our cultural memory has not been taken from us by dictators. Rather, like the comfortable, pleasure-seeking drones in Brave New World, we have ceased caring about the past because it inhibits our ability to seek pleasure in the present.
“You have to be more Socratic,” says Reynolds, “to draw students into it, and make it part of their identity. This is the kind of education that produced C. S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. Why would we want less for our kids today?”
“The classical Christian does not ask, ‘What can I do with this learning?’ but ‘What will this learning do to me?’”
if an abbot sees that a monk craftsman is taking undue pride in his work, the Rule requires the abbot to reassign him. It’s a harsh penalty, but one that reminds all Christians that our labor derives its ultimate value only from the role it plays in God’s economy.
“The point about temperance, including sexual discipline, is not that it reduces pleasure, but that it safeguards abundance.”
Christianity is not a disembodied faith but an incarnational one. God came to us in the form of a man, Jesus Christ, and redeems us body and soul. The way we treat our bodies (and indeed all of Creation) says something about the way we regard the One Who gave it to us and Whose presence fills all things. That’s the Gospel.
In speaking of how men and women of the early Christian era saw their bodies, historian Peter Brown says the body was embedded in a cosmic matrix in ways that made its perception of itself profoundly unlike our own. Ultimately, sex was not the expression of inner needs, lodged in the isolated body. Instead, it was seen as the pulsing, through the body, of the same energies as kept the stars alive. Whether this pulse of energy came from benevolent gods or from malevolent demons (as many radical Christians believed) sex could never be seen as a thing for the isolated human body alone.
Sin is not merely rule breaking but failing to live in accord with the structure of reality itself.
To be modern, as we have seen, is to believe in one’s individual desires as the locus of authority and self-definition.
As Pope Benedict XVI has written, “God’s way of loving becomes the measure of human love. This close connection between eros and marriage in the Bible has practically no equivalent in extra-biblical literature.”
To use technology is to participate in a cultural liturgy that, if we aren’t mindful, trains us to accept the core truth claim of modernity: that the only meaning there is in the world is what we choose to assign it in our endless quest to master nature.
Michael Hanby explained that “before technology becomes an instrument, it is fundamentally a way of regarding the world that contains within itself an understanding of being, nature, and truth.”
Technological Man understands freedom as liberation from anything that is not freely chosen by the autonomous individual.
technology as a worldview trains us to privilege what is new and innovative over what is old and familiar and to valorize the future uncritically.
One thing is very clear: if, knowing what we know today about the brain’s plasticity, you were to set out to invent a medium that would rewire our mental circuits as quickly and thoroughly as possible, you would probably end up designing something that looks and works a lot like the Internet.
religion has always understood that directing human attention toward what is holy is supremely important. This is why medieval Christendom was filled with prayers, rituals, fasts, and feasts: to keep life, both public and private, ordered around things divine.
“When a man leaves on a journey, he must know where he is going,” writes the Orthodox priest Alexander Schmemann in his study of Lent.
Did you know that Apple Computer founder Steve Jobs did not let his children use iPads and strictly limited their access to technology?
If “sharing the Gospel” means simply disseminating information about Jesus, then that makes sense. But we see that becoming a disciple of Christ is about submitting to formation, not absorbing information.
The core reason is that immersion in technology causes us to lose our collective memory. Without memory, we don’t know who we are, and if we don’t know who we are, we become whatever our momentary passions wish us to be.
“‘When the relations between man and God is subjective, interior (as in Luther) or in timeless acts and logic (as in Calvin) man’s utter dependence upon God is not mediated through the concrete facts of historical life,’ writes Canon Demant. And when it is not so mediated, the relation with God becomes tenuous, amorphous, and unsupportable.” Nisbet, The Quest for Community (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2010), 11.
